The Horror Behind the Holocaust
Academia's Days of Infamy

Lehman College Professor of History John Weiss has just published
Ideology of Death: Why the Holocaust Happened in Germany (Ivan R.
Dee), in which he banishes the single-cause fallacy that the Holocaust
would not have occurred without Hitler. He explores, instead, many
long-simmering factors that contributed to the construction of
Auschwitz and its ghastly brethren, notably the complicity of the
German academic community. Prof. Weiss has adapted the following
essay from his book.

Given the decades-old history of racist attitudes within the German
academic community, its wholesale collaboration with the Nazis is not
surprising. Dr. Josef Mengele has too often been singled out as an
aberrant, singular monster. The true horror is that Dr. Mengele,
like others who committed similar horrors, was simply a scientist and
researcher, an assistant professor at the famed Kaiser Wilhelm
Institute for Genetics. When he selected victims for death or fatal
experiments at Auschwitz, he worked with other academics as a faculty
member of the Institute, where faculty not only trained the SS
(Schutzstaffel) but participated in all phases of the destruction of
Jews, gypsies, and homosexuals.

Mengele's sponsor and the head of the Institute, Prof. Otmar von
Verschuer, also helped select candidates for death, and, along with
professors from various universities, competed for research grants to
study death camp victims. Mengele's Auschwitz research was also
sponsored by the Berlin-based Institute for the Advancement of
Science, which funneled Nazi funds into academic research. Moreover,
various universities requested and received the body parts of murdered
victims for research. Academics thanked Mengele when their learned
papers were composed with the help of his research data.

It was all quite normal. Prof. Hallervorden, head of a respected
institute, collected the brains of children killed in death camps.
The head of the University of Strasbourg, Prof. Auguste Hirt, wrote
Heinrich Himmler, commander of the SS, about the need to preserve the
skulls of "sub-human Jewish Bolsheviks" for research. In 1939, Prof.
Eugene Fischer, Rector of the University of Berlin, declared that the
Jews must be eliminated. A conference of academics recommended in
1941 that the "gypsy problem" be solved by drowning them at sea en
masse. Indeed, the standard German textbook on genetics, written in
1922, was full of anti-Semitic racism and was considered good science.
Its co-authors later competed for high positions in the SS. My
examples are neither atypical nor unprecedented; as we know, racism
was already common in the German academic community by as early as
1880.

In Auschwitz, Mengele was once asked, "When will all this killing
cease?" His answer: "Never. My friend! It will go on and on and on."
As a specialist in racial purification, Dr. Mengele, the holder of
degrees in anthropology and medicine, knew that after the Jews,
gypsies and homosexuals were gone, millions of Slavs would remain,
and a constant stream of German babies would have to be "selected
out" for mental and physical disabilities. As we have seen, many
academics had called for such policies decades before the Nazis.

The proof that Mengele's colleagues never thought him criminal came
in 1949. A faculty committee at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute found
him innocent of wrongdoing, declaring: "We cannot tell, from the
evidence available to us, to what extent Dr. Mengele himself was
aware of the abominations and murders perpetrated in Auschwitz
during the period under discussion..." Mengele fled only when the
Allies, needing Germany for the Cold War, ceased hunting even the
most vicious mass murderers, while the German judiciary busily
acquitted men as culpable as Mengele or more so.

Mengele's escape from Germany and his high visibility at Auschwitz
singled him out. But for many Germans his allegedly unique
monstrosity, like that of Hitler, created an excuse for avoiding the
investigation of the decades-old culture of German and Austrian
racism. Westerners of good will still assume too easily that
scientific learning imparts liberal values; hence, they look for
psychological deviancy rather than cultural and historical causes for
the racist terror committed by educated Germans. But German
intellectuals rarely accepted the Enlightenment view that the human
personality is formed by social experience and external conditioning
rather than innate and unchangeable racial traits. This belief, of
course, enabled German academics to distance themselves with cold
rationality from any human connection with their victims.

There is a more profound truth at stake here. The Holocaust is
unique; but it is not unintelligible. Like all historical traumas, it
is subject to a rational analysis of cause and effect. Until now we
have been too ready to believe that the causes of racial hatred are
located mainly in the deep recesses of deviant psyches; we remain
relatively unaware of the particular historical situations and social
upheavals which can release and sanction the almost universal need to
punish racial or religious scapegoats. Sadly, as it recedes into the
past, the Holocaust takes on the aura of a sacred event, an
abstraction resistant to comprehension.

One is left with a sense of despair and frustration, for what cannot
be explained cannot be prevented. "Never Again" becomes a pious hope,
and we are rendered incapable of distinguishing between the ever-
present but transient obscenities of the thousands of anti-Semitic
incidents reported each year, and a full-blown ideology of hate which
points to deep-rooted social tensions and presages mass violence.
Unexplained, the horror is mourned, memorialized and given over to the
ruminations of moralists, psychologists, and theologians. They have
much of value to say, but they cannot tell us what we must know: How
it was that in one of the most advanced nations of the West, millions
of innocent civilians were sacrificed in the service of an ancient and
barbarous mythology of racial purity? And it is my belief that, until
now, we have been deaf to the resounding echo of hatred toward Jews in
large sectors of the German public, to which the Nazis were so keenly
attuned... and blind to the long decades of cultural devolution in
Germany that made it possible for the terrible sound to reverberate in
such deadly fashion.